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Under the reign of Xian’s son Duke Xiao (361-338 BC), a reformer named Shang Yang deepened Duke Xian’s reforms, reinforcing their centralizing drive, with systematic zeal that brings to mind the effect of Lycurgus’ efforts on the Qin state of Greece – Sparta.
Shang Yang was an aristocrat from the smallish state of Wey, and a supporter of written rules which he imposed in Qin, in the form of a legal code, from 356 BC[1]. Like most code-writers before him, Shang Yang preferred stern punishments that extended to the use of nonstandard weights and measures by officials; he came up with the novelty of rewarding denouncers (as generously as soldiers successful in battle) and punishing those who failed to report crimes along with the malefactors; hiding a culprit was punished in the same manner as surrendering to the enemy.
Shang Yang set up a hierarchy of ranks to reward service to the state, particularly in battle, based on measurements such as counting the number of heads of slain enemies a particular soldier presented after action. Military rewards were also inheritable, and might derive in aristocratic titles with serfs attached, if there were inhabited lands available. Successful soldiers were entitled to higher tomb mounds, and the planting of more trees on the tomb than others.
He also added a twist to common practice elsewhere: while other Warring States had long given non-hereditary fiefs as rewards for officials and successful commanders, in Qin they sometimes received private land that they could use as they preferred – likely a nod to the fact that the long campaign to take and settle Sichuan included the extermination or flight of many of its original inhabitants, who left empty fields behind as result.
The need to make those lands productive again was behind Shang Yang’s pro-agriculture measures, and China’s strongest anti-trader measures: in Qin, merchants had to register their servants for forced labor (labor from which many peasants were excluded) and paid both market and transit taxes; sumptuary laws forced them to register their households as those of “inferior people” so they were not allowed to wear silk or ride horses, and they were subject to extended garrison duty at the frontier when conscripted[2].
Local farmers, meanwhile, paid capitation taxes, so they could lower their burden simply by sending their sons away to till other fields, thus expanding production for the state. Migrant farmers were exempted from military service and taxes for as long as three generations, as a way to attract people from elsewhere in China[3]; demographic and output expansion was a particular Shang Yang’s obsession that would be later much influential, since Qin couldn’t maintain an aggressive stance if there were no men to bulk up its armies.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
For all his power and the importance of reforms that would eventually turn the state of Qin into an engine for China’s unification, Shang Yang wouldn’t be the most influential man of the era, since his generation also saw the birth of a thinker who had little effect on his contemporaries, but after his death has long been considered as the second-most important in Chinese history, only after Confucius.
Born in the same modern province of Shandong as Confucius, a mere thirty kilometers from the great sage's birthplace, Mencius (also known as Mengzi, 孟子, Meng Ke, 372–289 BC) came from a weirdly celebrated family.
Like Plato's, Mencius' father died when he was very young, leaving her mother in poverty. The mother didn't flinch and is often held up as an exemplary female figure in Chinese culture: she has her own four-character idiom, "Mencius's mother, three moves"[4], a popular saying that refers to the legend that Mencius's mother moved houses three times before finding a location that she felt was suitable for the child's upbringing.
As the story goes, at first Mencius and his mum lived by a cemetery, where the mother found her son imitating the professional mourners that wealthy families paid to weep in funeral processions. She then decided to move. The second location was a house near the market in town. There, Mencius began to imitate the cries of traders; a Greek mother would have been proud, thinking of a moneyed future in the agora and political appointments down the road, but Chinese merchants, never as rich or influential as those in Greece, were a traditionally despised class. So the mother moved to a house next to a school.
There, Mencius took inspiration from scholars and students, and began to study under a very prominent local teacher, Zisi, a grandson of Confucius. His mother decided to remain, but even there she had to use her wits to keep her son in the straight and narrow path: a famous story tells of how Mencius was a young rebel, so his mother took some scissors and cut the cloth she had been weaving, in front of him, to illustrate her point that one can't stop a task, such as getting an education, midway.
Eventually, Mencius became a scholar, which certainly didn't come as a surprise to anyone. Like many others of his class and condition, he took the road, and spent four decades as an itinerant wise man, providing well-considered advice on multiple, high-born ears. From 319 to 312 BC, he was an official and scholar at the Jixia Academy in the State of Qi, where he had the chance to express filial devotion by taking a three-year leave of absence to mourn his mother's death.
This long absence, combined with Mencius' obvious lack of a practical strain, probably doomed his attempts at bureaucratic success. Unable to make much of an impact on Qi policies, Mencius retired from public life and spent his last few years in contemplation, study and writing. He had numerous children some of whose direct descendants found prominence in future Chinese dynasties and in Korea.
His philosophy, however, has been much more significant for Chinese history than his family's deeds. Mencius added a pseudo-Taoist moral layer to the eminently practical teachings of Confucius, insisting that humans are innately good and society is the source of corrupting evil. In an era of widespread Taoist influence, in Shang Yang’s era no less, this helped Mencius found his niche in countering Taoist pessimism with suggestions on how to detoxify society, rather than running away from it[5].
Mencius also found ways to engage with mohists, by praising Mozi, founder of their school, as a man with a tireless contribution to society, who had no concern for personal gain or even for his own life or death: a moral man. In the Jinxin chapter of the magnus opus named after himself, Mencius wrote that Mozi believed in love for all mankind, adding that, as long as something benefits mankind, Mozi would pursue it even if it means hurting his head or his feet. This helped him with influential mohists, many of whom came from Henan, just to the west of Qi/Shandong.
Where Confucius was curt and direct, Mencius was long and sometimes unctuous, always a political player trying to please all political constituencies. The classic book named after him consists of long dialogues, including arguments, with long-winded prose, that European missionaries of the Renaissance found uninteresting and, frankly, a bit of a Taoist contamination of the Confucian canon[6].
[1] This code was widely believed to have been inspired by Li Kui’s in Wei.
[2] Shang Yang, like many Chinese thinkers and politicians, had a visceral scorn of traders and wealth-seeking in general; in his “Book of Lord Shang” compiling his sayings, he’s quoted as stating that: the “desire of people for riches and honor does not generally cease before their coffins are closed.” He also called merchants “vermin of society.” With no temptation or possibility of doing anything other than fight or farm, the people would become “stupid” and “simple minded”, yes, but therefore fully compliant with the state’s directives. As the Shujing proclaimed: “A leader should be loved. Who should be feared? The People.” One of his most famous maxims is: “The important thing in undertaking the administration of a country is to make the rich poor, and the poor rich. If that is effective, the country will be strong.”
[3] This idea is simply described in the “Book of Lord Shang” as “attracting people” (“Lai min.”)
[4] 孟母三遷 (mèngmǔ-sānqiān)
[5] Later generations have found Mencius' simple teaching good for kids: for many years, Chinese children who were just beginning to learn the complex Chinese writing system were given the Three Characters Classic textbook; this was so called because each sentence in the book consisted of three characters arranged so that when recited they produced a rhythmic effect, and thus helped the children to memorize them. The very first statement in it is Mencius' “the nature of man is originally good.”
[6] The missionaries chose to translate little of Mencius, and they also had ulterior motives: they found that Mencius smacked of pre-Buddhism; Matteo Ricci, in particular, disliked Mencius's strong condemnation of celibacy as betrayal to one's ancestors.